8 ms·

Fascinating. I wonder if it'll someday be possible to clone an animal from just their genome, without needing to store physical samples.

• lisper 5y ago
  Almost certainly not. The genome is not the only information you need. You also need the gestation environment. It’s kind of like trying to compile gcc from source without a working gcc.
  • thewakalix 5y ago
    Can't gcc also be compiled (with sufficient effort) using a different C compiler? Non-metaphorically, I vaguely remember something about using elephants to gestate cloned mammoths.
    • throwaway2048 5y ago
      Which did not work.
    • Ericson2314 5y ago
      At the very least there is mitochondrial DNA. Perhaps there is also some epigenetic things.
  • xwdv 5y ago
    Why not géstate in some sort of artificial womb?
    • na85 5y ago
      >artificial womb? Because such a thing is non-trivial to invent and does not yet exist.
      • staticassertion 5y ago
        So it's not "almost certainly not" it's "we have a long way to go".
        • na85 5y ago
          >So it's not "almost certainly not" it's "we have a long way to go". Says you. Are you a subject matter expert?
          • staticassertion 5y ago
            No, says you. > non-trivial > does not yet exist
            • na85 5y ago
              The fact that artificial wombs do not currently exist should be evidence enough that they are non-trivial to invent and perfect. One cannot substitute confidence for domain expertise.
              • staticassertion 5y ago
                No idea what you're talking about. You said yourself it's non-trivial and we aren't there yet. So "some day it might be possible" seems reasonable, not "almost certainly not".
                • na85 5y ago
                  >we aren't there yet. Those are your words, not mine. I think "almost certainly not" is by far the best appraisal of the situation. Unless you have domain expertise, then your confident statement of "we aren't there yet" or "we have a long way to go" is just hot air, and dramatically overstates the probability of this ever coming to pass.
                  • 5y ago
    • riffraff 5y ago
      We have no idea how the artificial womb should look like. It's basically the idea that we want to bake a cake, we have the recipe but don't know the kind of oven we need, nor the temperature, and only have a vague idea of how the result should look like. We may get a cake by trial and error, but it's not guaranteed.
      • drran 5y ago
        See it there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk0RZgDOkgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk0RZgDOkgM
        • riffraff 5y ago
          That is a fetus brought to term, between an embryo and a fetus there is a lot of conceptual space. This premature fetuses are basically fully formed creatures but small, we have no idea how to do the first part. Also again: we're doing this looking at a working plan, it's different from guessing how one for an extinct animal may look like.
  • pabs3 5y ago
    The Bootstrappable Builds folks are working on building an entire Linux distro, including GCC, starting at around 512 bytes of machine code, plus all the source code. I think they have had some success already: https://bootstrappable.org/ https://bootstrappable.org/ https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/parts.rst https://github.com/fosslinux/live-bootstrap/blob/master/part... https://github.com/oriansj/talk-notes/blob/master/live-bootstrap.pdf https://github.com/oriansj/talk-notes/blob/master/live-boots...
    • josefx 5y ago
      Do those 512 bytes include the signed shim from Microsoft for Secure Boot?
      • pabs3 5y ago
        The signed shim itself is orders of magnitude larger than 512 bytes, not to mention the firmware that starts shim. I don't think the Bootstrappable Builds folks are interested in touching proprietary software/firmware, so it is likely they would not be using UEFI or similar.
  • spijdar 5y ago
    While I appreciate the analogy, like others have pointed out, it's kind of broken as gcc is designed to be buildable by other C compilers, or at least, it's not impossible to bootstrap from a simpler C compiler. A closer analogy would be like trying to build Apple's Darwin distribution tarball into an OS image without XBuild or a MacOS install, or any of Apple's other custom/proprietary tools.
  • halotrope 5y ago
    What a great analogy!
    • lisper 5y ago
      Thanks.